There couldn’t be a more perfect decisions game than what is going on in Grandview-Woodlands these days.

A respected agency that serves the mentally ill, desperate to find a way to renew and expand, partners with a developer to rebuild at the corner of Venables and Commercial, using its own property, the developer’s two sites on either side, and city land. Thirty units of housing plus a new centre if the developer can get the density to build 200 condos.

On the other side, a core group of opponents in the community who say, yes, we appreciate the work the Kettle Friendship Society has done, but we don’t want anything higher than four stories on the Drive, no matter how many mentally ill people this might help.

The debate has been bubbling for three years. Last week, Kettle jointly released with Boffo Properties a visualization of the project, presumably to demonstrate that a 12-storey project can fit in and isn’t any more obtrusive than the tower nearby.

But the opponents are still opposed. As part of the battle, they developed a slate and got them all elected to the Grandview-Woodlands Area Council on the weekend. And they’ve put out a proposal that the city donate its land (worth $5 million or so) to Kettle so that it doesn’t have to rely on the developer’s condo profit for its housing.

(I’ve included the full proposal from the group below.)

While that seems like one obvious solution, it would be interesting to hear from the group how they think the city would justify that to every other neighbourhood that has found itself being asked to absorb significant new density so that the city can leverage some social housing or rental in the project.

Every one of those neighbourhoods would probably like the city — or someone — to contribute millions so that the proposed tower near them could be reduced: Strathcona and 955 East Hastings, Yaletown and the Brenhill project with its rebuild of Jubilee House, the West End and the several rental towers there, Oakridge and the massive development planned with its seniors and rental housing components, every tower that’s about to be proposed along Burrard, which will have social-housing units as part of the requirement, and the many others out there I am sure you all can help list.

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There was a lot of praise last week for city council’s decision to hire Sadhu Johnston, the 41-year-old who has been deputy city manager since 2009 and then acting city manager since last fall, as the replacement for Penny Ballem. (My story here.)

(The only dissenter I found was Councillor George Affleck who said, without dissing Johnston, that the whole process made it seem as though the fix was in long ago. Affleck said that the city had interviewed several excellent candidates, contradicting rumours I’d heard that the headhunters had told the city that there was a certain hesitation among applicants given that the mayor had just fired his own hand-picked choice.)

People are seeing this as a sign of change in how the city will act, something that Johnston has been reinforcing. Even before getting the job, he called together all the former city planners who have been increasingly critical about city moves to ask for their advice.

He told me he’s had an hour-long talk with Bob Mackin, the reporter who has dedicated part of his career to filing FOI requests with the city, on how to improve FOI processes.

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Alert readers may have clued in to the fact that I was out of the city during February. Among other places visited, I was in Buenos Aires for a week, a city I’ve never been before.

And, once again, I was amazed and frustrated and ticked off at how complicated it was to figure out how to use the transit system, the same feeling I’ve had in Toronto, San Francisco, Rome, and numerous other cities.

It’s beyond me why cities that get large numbers of new arrivals and tourists, not to mention the existing huge populations they service, allow transit messes to develop that turn taking the bus and subway into a maze.

New York and Paris are the best. You go to the subway station. You get a pass for a week or a month or three days or whatever and you can use it on everything. You might even get a map.

In Buenos Aires, a considerable part of my mental bandwidth during the week went into figuring out how to use both. The subway, okay, was easy enough. You get a paper ticket for a certain number of rides or a plastic SUBTE card and you’re off. (And an incredible bargain — about 50 cents Cdn per ride.)

For the buses, which I ended up preferring because a) you’re above-ground and b) they go to more places in the city, a whole ‘nother story. I was told in the guidebooks that buses would take real money, but that wasn’t true for most I was on. Instead, you have to buy a plastic SUBE card from a kiosca (corner-store type operation) for $3 Cdn, then get it loaded with value. We managed to find, after much hunting, a kiosca that would do both and thought we were good.

But, when we went to re-load, it turned out that we couldn’t find a kiosca anywhere that would re-load some value — even the place where we got the original card and extra value claimed they couldn’t provide us with that any more. Not sure whether it was just that hour or just that day or what.

This is not some “developing country” thingie. I’ve had the same experience in San Francisco, where a Clipper card for the BART subway system (which you can only buy at certain drugstores and select metro stops), doesn’t allow you to transfer to the bus system. You pay again (albeit with a small discount). And you have to buy your bus tickets in a different place from BART passes.

In Toronto, I’ve spent more hours hunting for the right place to buy what I needed to take the bus/streetcar, without having to hike a few miles to the nearest Metro stop.

In Rome, we simply gave up and rode the buses and trams for free for several days while we tried to figure out where the heck we should buy transit tickets.

I’m sure some dear readers will respond, saying “Oh, it’s really easy, you should have just done X or Y.” But the point is, it should all be completely obvious and everywhere how to use the transit system in cities that rely on them. (And in Buenos Aires, you really need it. The streets are hopelessly jammed. It took 40 minutes in a taxi to get from the centre to the relatively nearby district of Palermo in non-rush-hour traffic.)

And it should be obvious for people who aren’t fluent Spanish or Italian speakers. There should be some kind of international symbol that indicates “transit tickets that work for the whole system HERE.” (Visualizations gratefully accepted.)

Your stories of transit frustration — or compliments for the best systems ever — welcome here.

The province is about to finalize legislation this spring to allow strata councils to sell buildings with only 80 per cent of owners in agreement, as opposed to the currently required 100 per cent.

This, combined with the fact that developers are frantically searching for redevelopment sites as cities have rezoned areas for higher densities, is likely to set off a wave of sell-offs.

Here’s what it was like for one group of owners that went through the process.

We’d heard there was a New Yorker writer in town a few months ago working on a piece about Vancouver. It’s out now. It’s main job seems to be to continue circulating the catchy narrative about Vancouver.

As always, in my role as chief grump and nitpicker, I thought it could have had a tiny bit more context — i.e. more than a quarter of Vancouver’s 600,000 residents are Chinese and many people are not like this — and, oh, some actual numbers besides the same old partial ones as always.

But that’s just me. Your thoughts on what you learned, or didn’t, from this piece?

Catching up on a story from last week: The woes of litter and decomposed guck for Vancouver.

Some media interpreted the city report on “what to do about this” as calling for a ban. But the city’s head of “les ordures,” Albert Shamess, says that’s probably not the answer.

What ever will they come up with?

If Vancouver residents really want the province to start making changes to try to moderate the officially out-of-control (parts, anyway) real-estate market in Vancouver, just holding demonstrations and/or waiting for newsrooms to provide coverage is not going to do it.

My experience of politicians — okay, not all, some do things strictly out of principle — is that they wait to see how much public uproar there is. If it seems like it will die off in a few weeks, they’ll just sit out the dust storm. If it seems like it’s building up to serious levels, they’ll start to move.

One thing that would have an impact is if homeowners, those people with their money sunk into the market and whom the premier seems to be so afraid will be upset if she does anything, should start a petition saying they do not need the excessive profits that the last couple of years have been providing and that they’d rather see the market moderated.

Many people I know, myself included, take no pleasure in seeing the big jump in alleged value of our homes the last couple of years.

They’re not planning to cash out and take their millions to Hedley or Charlottetown. They are committed Vancouverites (and, by this, I don’t mean just the city but the region) who want to stay and would like to see other committed Vancouverites be given a chance to put down  roots here.

Go ahead: Let the premier and her party know, in your thousands, that you don’t need that extra $500,000 or $1 million or $2 million on top of the 300 per cent or so increase in value you’ve already seen on your property since you bought.

One note: Even though I’m encouraging this, I do it with the warning that I don’t think any of the measures so far proposed are going to do what some people want, which is to return Vancouver real-estate values to the level of Saskatoon or even Victoria. That’s not going to happen. It wasn’t even happening in the ’70s and ’80s.

Vancouver is one of the many cities around the world that have become go-to places and where real-estate values have risen because the number of all people wanting to buy here is exceeding the supply.

But one of my blog commenters said, “I’d just be happy to see it go back to 2005.”

What needs to be taken out of the Vancouver equation is the layer on top of the general jump in property prices that exceeds wage increases that’s happening everywhere. That layer is the extras — the speculation, the use of houses to park investment cash while leaving them empty, and so on. We don’t know how much of that there really is. Maybe only a few hundred properties in this region of 2-million-plus.

But at least sanding off the crazy peaks at the top would prevent even more speculation and loophole diving.

Then Vancouverites who really want to do more will have to look at much bigger measures.

For those who believe it’s the demand that’s the problem, pressure to limit immigration and, perhaps, limit the number of wealthy people who can immigrate. (I know that sounds wacky, but, really, when you listen to some conversations out there, that’s what some groups really want. They dress it up by saying they don’t want people with illegal money or who are leaving families here while working abroad or whatever. But, truly, what they don’t want is wealthy people competing with locals for housing.)

For those who believe it’s supply that’s the problem, there should be pressure to convert more areas to housing that uses less land but is still ground-oriented, as the planners call it — places where you can walk out the front door and not have to use an elevator to get outside.

Just a side note: I will be so happy when I get to write fewer stories about the city’s kooky real-estate market. But, now, in the meantime …

Lots of chattering these days about the high prices that key pieces of Vancouver commercial real-estate are going for: Royal Centre, $400-million to a German investor. Bayshore, $300-million to Concord Pacific. The Denny’s restaurant site on Broadway, $500 a buildable square foot.

All of that is mysterious enough. On top of that, various reporters have latched on to another puzzling phenomenon, which is a couple of local companies that appear to have businesses going “crowd funding” real-estate purchases. Solicitations for investors for the Molson’s brewery site and a Nelson Street site have been dug up in recent weeks, with various promises in the solicitations, which appeared to be linked to a company called Sun Commercial, about what kind of redevelopment is possible on the sites. (Sam Cooper at The Province was the first to spot this.)

The B.C. Securities Commission got involved to find out whether this was a violation of any rules on raising money from investors. In the meantime, councillors and planners are mystified and not sure whether these buyers will know, when they arrive at city hall, that rezoning is going to be complicated or downright impossible. My story, detailing some of the saga of what’s been going on, is here. (Don’t be put off by the inaccurate headline.)

I should point out that, at the moment, no one seems to know whether anyone did actually invest anything. All we know is these weird solicitations appeared on various social media locations.

One set of companies that got caught up in the reporting and securities commission review, Luxmore Realty and Canada Luxmore Crowdfunding, has been trying to set the record straight, at least about what its company is doing. Luxmore, which hasn’t been pitching any big Vancouver properties to my knowledge, doesn’t raise money directly or “crowd fund” in the Canadian sense of the word.

Instead, as Luxmore rep Jason Liu said, what it means in his operation is explaining to people what kinds of investments are out there (real estate and otherwise) and then encouraging them, if they’re interested, to find other interested investors and form legal partnerships so they can invest as a group.

Whatever is going on, Vancouver’s market continues to get weirder … and not in the fun, Austin sense.

This just out

STATEMENT: DR ARVIND GUPTA

Today UBC released a number of documents related to my resignation as President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia. As a result, I am compelled to comment on the documents, their content, tone and the accuracy of what they portray.
What was published is a one-sided representation of what transpired in the months prior to my resignation.
I have spent my entire working life trying to make this country and province better. The chance to be UBC’s President was an exciting opportunity to build a 21st century university, one that is better connected to the community, and the bigger world beyond the campus. This modern version of our largest university is essential to making BC into an even better society.
As President, I made a commitment to the people of British Columbia, the Board, the students and the faculty that we would move UBC to become one of the top universities in the world.
That goal meant substantial change including a rethinking of priorities and refocusing on the academic mission. And change can make some people uneasy. If it didn’t, it would be called the status quo. So, it is no surprise that not everyone at the university embraced this vision and the required actions.
That said, the assertions in the released documents, were not based on facts or evidence given to me at any time.
Still, I attempted to work in a collegial manner which is the hallmark of every well-governed university. Unfortunately there was never any formal review of my performance, or outreach by the Board to the broader university community. This would have allowed both the UBC Board and myself to assess my first year accomplishments and the scope of the work ahead.
This past summer it became clear to me that I did not have the support of the full Board and, as such, felt I had no other option but to resign in the best interest of the university. It is my sincerest hope that I, with leading UBC scholars, will carry on this important work on behalf of UBC, British Columbia, and Canada.

 

I asked to interview TransLink’s new board chair, Don Rose, recently to get a sense of what course corrections the agency is making these days. A couple of days after I talked to him, former interim CEO Doug Allen’s confidential report on what’s right and wrong at TransLink got released through Freedom of Information.

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